Session Name: Re-engaging environmental knowledge. Sites and politics of heritage, spiritual care and medi(t)ation in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
2 - The Kedatyan of Sukuh: Ancestral Vision at the Ruin of an Ancient Temple
Tuesday, July 30, 2024
14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)
Presentation Abstract This paper will explore the ways in which Sukuh, built in the 15th century and located in Mount Lawu, continues to carry meanings for Javanese communities at the beginning of the 19th century. This will centre on and around a close reading of the 1814 Sêrat
Cênthini
on the ruin of this ancient temple. This Cênthini
passage was largely ignored yet widely available at the time when Sukuh was primarily presented as the marker for the end of the Hindu-Buddhist period in Indonesia's art history and archaeology from the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries. I will give special attention to analysing the figure of Bhima—the main character in Sukuh and the second brother of Pandava
from Mahabharata
tales—as represented in both reliefs and statues at the temple. Appraising the importance of Bhima will allow our discussion to move beyond the ruin of Sukuh and into the world of wayang.
Historian Laurie J. Sears has shown the ways in which the Javanese had appropriated the stories from Mahabharata
and Ramayana
into the historical narratives of their distant past, mainly through localised wayang
tales. Understanding this particular imagination of the past, I argue that the characterisation of Bhima plays an active role in the place-making being performed in Mount Lawu. In this context, the mystical stories and locales circulating the figure of Bhima were transplanted into the ancestral landscape of Lawu, of which Sukuh was one of the more essential components.